'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs
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If you don't own your platform, you don't own your content.
Register your domain, install wordpress, start your own blog.
We actually created https://startablog.com to drive this point home, teach people how to do it and even have a team that will do it for you for free if you need the help (lots of people still find the WP install process intimidating).
You mean like running your own webserver? Why would I do that instead of just getting a web host that'll take care of all of the sysadmin for you?
With a lot of web hosting platforms all you'll need is to just press a button on a web site, then all you'll have to deal with is the wordpress interface
For my personal sites I've always done something custom or a static site generator. That definitely requires some more in-depth setup on the frontend, but the long-term maintenance is drastically reduced compared to Wordpress. Sure you don't need to know the command line, but unless you log in weekly to check for plugin updates, make sure you properly vet your plugins, and either get lucky or spend a bunch of time on site optimization, your site will probably be slow and, at some point, get hacked.
You can pay for more hands-on hosting that includes managing a lot of that stuff, but all of a sudden the costs get a lot higher. For a personal blog, I don't want to pay $30/month for hosting.
Nothing about Jekyll + Github Pages feels "no maintenance" yet.
Generally speaking, the HN audience is not the typical audience we have at StartABlog.com, but WP "just works" well enough for most people.
1. https://www.colbyrussell.com/2019/03/06/how-to-displace-java...
Forcing people to register a domain and choose a template is "too much work" compared to that.
One of the things I mentioned in that post is folks' tunnel vision—in these cases, tunnel vision on the parts of the people associated with the project who are unable to see the actual number of hurdles that an outsider will encounter. The post on the Light Table blog[1] that I referenced lays this out, too. Its title "Pain We Forgot" is almost self-explanatory.
You don’t have to ever touch the command line or FTP or Git or anything technical like that. You can if you want to but nowadays it’s a one-click affair in the control panel of most hosting services. Who will also probably auto-install some cache and security plugins for you because this saves them a shit-ton of support tickets. Yes, YOU are comfortable with all this technical shit but most people are not.
WordPress has had auto-updates for years and years. You only have to manually intervene to upgrade it when they do a major version bump that may break things.
WordPress has a lot more themes available than any static site generator ever will.
WordPress has a ton of plugins to do stuff, some simple, some complex.
Static blogs mostly suck because they have no UI for the user. You're generally required to run your own text editor, manage all files yourself, run some build scripts, deal with the errors. Oh, and likely you need to be on a PC/Mac instead of a phone or tablet so less options.
OTOH Wordpress requires constant maintenance. Like literally every month or more often you're required to install updates and if you install any plugins you're required to stay on top of those too. I got off wordpress for precisely those reasons. I run a static blog but, in part because of the friction vs WordPress I rarely post anymore.
Not entirely true. You can generate nicely formatted content using a centralized service, and then self-host the files it outputs. E.g. we support this with FWD:Everyone, folks are free to use our tool to format any email thread for publication on the web, and then self-host published threads elsewhere by just saving our API responses.
IMHO this is a much better deal for folks than either hosting Wordpress, using a simple static site generator, or using a purely centralized service. You always get the latest tech that we’re investing in, but also the freedom to go nuts and do whatever.
I use https://brid.gy/ to syndicate posts from my own website (https://www.jvt.me/mf2/2020/04/svn4c/) to Twitter (https://twitter.com/JamieTanna/status/1254670009420431360) so I'm still owning my content, but I can still interact with folks on other platforms.
And then have 0 people read your blog because it’s on your random domain.
Maybe your strategy works for well known bloggers, but tweeting content that people actually read beats owning content that nobody reads. And it is much harder to get people to visit your self-hosted blog than it is to get them to read your tweets.
This. More people should probably blog to their perfect audience either that audience exists or not.
I used to write about stuff that I spent more than a couple of hours to and that couldn't be found on the internet. Back in the days at least that meant I'd get search engine traffic from other developers searching for solutions to that problem.
It didn't earn me any money but it was still very useful for me to learn from.
Edit: add "should probably"
Well, the same thing could be said of most tweets written by a random person. Building an audience rarely happens overnight. These things take time, be it on twitter or your blog. It is still better to own your content (and maybe syndicate it elsewhere, like on Twitter) regardless of whether you have an audience or not.
But now blogs discoverability needs to be solved again.
I used to have a Firefox plugin that would tweet all my bookmarks, but then Twitter hid all my tweets from the search.
Then you have to gasp tell someone about it.
The idea that if you build something people will automatically know about it is a delightful fantasy that has never actually been true - regardless of whatever distribution promises Apple, Medium, or Twitter will make you.
I'm shocked! SHOCKED, I TELL YOU!
I appreciate it's some tiny fraction of what's out there, but if you want to do it you can do it, you just probably have to recognise that it's not content alone that's going to be important.
The bigger problem is how can we network indepdent blogs in a federated fashion where it's easier to have responses, build audiences, etc.
i.e. You can't exactly respond very easily and see the 10k view with a single blog article.
BUT Then again this is what you get with the whole "well twitter is a better place to be"/walled garden apologists.
I've been toying with ideas to bring "social" aspects into sites, as I think the most difficult component, these days, is discoverability (finding a twitter profile is a lot easier than finding a random wordpress blog) and recurrence (nobody uses RSS anymore, for instance, so how do you even know about new content to come back to?).
Or maybe we're just nostalgic, and the future is indeed shorter and shorter bits of text and 5-second vertical video.
Edit: an earlier version of this post said I found it in the referrers log. It seems I was wrong.
If anyone is interested learning more about the IndieWeb, https://www.jvt.me/posts/2019/10/20/indieweb-talk/ is a transcript of a conference talk I gave on what the IndieWeb is
Why Twitter doesn't at least try this feature in an opt-in way beats me.
It makes it harder for people to reply to the chain (do you reply to the first or last?). The same problem exists for retweets; if someone retweets a tweet partway through the thread, it doesn't behave as neatly as you describe iirc.
Also, there's just a difference for the author. Writing a paragraph of text like this comment, where I get to go back through it and edit it as I go, add and remove paragraphs... It results in me creating a more carefully edited and thoughtful piece of writing. With the tweet threads, someone either has to write the tweets one at a time (and can't edit previous ones) with twitter dictating the breaks, or they have to do paragraph-oriented editing locally, and then figure out how to break it up correctly for tweets (which is non-trivial actually! URLs take up a difficult-to-predict-naively number of characters, so it's not naively 140 chars if you have urls, etc).
Basically, twitter's model facilitates a different sort of writing and reading than a single long post does, even if they are just both a bunch of letters.
If you were limited to 280:
Some discussions have nuance that cannot be expressed in 280 characters.
Yes, when expressing a simple idea or an idea you understand very well, you should be able to do so concisely.
However, when providing information to someone else about a complicated subject, or trying to
It's artificial scarcity, that doesn't really benefit the reader that much, and certainly not the writer.
This medium provides the good sides of Twitter with the good sides of a federated system, where content discovery is still done organically through people. If experts want something as easy to use as Twitter _and_ have the possibility of having more space, I feel they should migrate to it. Or anything that uses ActivityPub really, like Write.as or Plume
There's also the whole indieweb movement, with micropub, microformats and stuff that anyone can play with, like with Micro.blog.
All options that give more control to the user
Ofcourse, its about how you're interpreting this information - by inquiry or face value (which can be dangerous).
I was skeptical about feed quality getting diluted when twitter increased character limit to 280 -- fortunately, for me, it hasn't (as much as I expected) with few exceptions.
This isn't a good thing. Who's an expert vs an amateur just having fun? Who's just musing idly while sipping scotch versus gone through several drafts and really put a lot of work into this? Who's passionate, if wrong, vs a troll and a provocateur?
It's fine for all those things to exist, it's not fine that we can't tell the difference and then amplify an unsuspecting chunk of them to a massive audience.
“I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
― Mark Twain
Or not use Twitter at all.
Yes, when expressing a simple idea or an idea you understand very well, you should be able to do so concisely.
However, when providing information to someone else about a complicated subject, or trying to provide reasoning for something, it's very easy to need more words.
There's a reason that encyclopedia entries are usually much longer than 280 characters even though they're expressing a single point that supposedly the author knew very well.
When answering a question that requires referencing multiple other pieces of information and where the answers aren't certain, you even more easily overflow 280 characters. For example, saying "I started with a ballpark estimate from these facts (fact, fact fact), and extrapolating with this assumption, you get to this. However, if you extrapolate in this way, you get a slightly different answer" etc etc, expressing that uncertainty, the assumptions, and alternatives are all _very_ verbose.
There is also a huge issue where people get tricked into thinking familiarity = knowledge. Reading tons of 280 char texts seemingly synthesising complex ideas in "single bite" portions is a problem, it makes you think you know something when in reality you just absorbed 280 characters of "facts" without any context or substance, it doesn't better you. Especially on twitter, which must be the most polarised and polarising medium out there. It is level 0 of knowledge acquisition.
> You must linger among a limited number of master-thinkers, and digest their works, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind. Everywhere means nowhere.- Seneca
The audience of people who might read your blog but who aren't stuck on a scroll treadmill is too small to bother, especially with the death of many popular rss readers.
Disparaging entire mediums makes little sense. There is both enlightening and mind-numbing content on social networks, blogs, television, and books. Are people that read many books drooling page-turning zombies? Is scrolling through blogs inherently superior to Twitter scrolling?
I think it makes a lot of sense when the medium is purpose designed and highly optimized to maximize additive shallow interaction.
Sorry, I've had too many meetings and dinners disrupted by too many different people who couldn't stay off the phone to keep pretending it isn't a problem. ... and had far too many informative long form works ignored by their target audience (members of which also just spent our last meeting glued to facebook scroll).
The rudeness of your guests does not justify passing judgment on millions of people with an almost infinitely broad spectrum of usage patterns, and makes about as much sense as criticizing those who read words on paper.
I don't really like this focus on the size of audiences that has come with social media. For experts or scientists who want to communicate with other scientists, it shouldn't matter how large the casual audience is but how they can effectively communicate with each other.
Neither do I. As a freelancer, I don't care about traffic at all. That's almost the opposite. If you want to choose your clients, that means you need just a select few people to visit your site and then hire you (and not all at the same time, please). In that use case, you optimize for a few people, and what would be of interest to them. If someone else enjoys the site, it's a bonus, but that's not the goal, no matter what the tribe building marketers want you to believe.
Quality over quantity.
There are plenty of people who blog and tweet, and who read blogs and read tweets. Back when I used twitter, I used it partly as a sorta glamorized rss feed for when certain people posted blogs.
There are and always have been people who do not read long-form blogs and people who do. I see no evidence that social media has changed that significantly.
You can produce outcomes through both processes. Depends fully on what problems you work on.
But a bigger issue is at work here - censorship. Twitter is being pulled in two opposite directions. It's a platform in which authoritative content is hosted. For example, the president conducts foreign policy through Twitter. And Twitter is also a platform where bots try to influence elections, people post images of dubious taste, and plain old lies are told.
Twitter has been leaning ever-harder into the role of curating authoritative content. The idea of verified identities as a prerequisite to post has been floated, and will no doubt resurface.
All of this leads to a dead-end. Twitter won't be able to afford to host anything remotely controversial (i.e., interesting) for fear of upsetting the thought police.
The same problem applies to Facebook, Medium, and all the others.
The reason to blog is simple. Because sooner or later a rational human exploring the bounds of human knowledge through writing will post something that will make one or more powerful people scared, angry, or offended. A blog makes retaliatory deplatforming much more difficult to pull off.
To be fair, both political ends of the spectrum in the US have been leaning very hard on Twitter, Facebook & Youtube to increase the active moderation of their platforms, algorithms and advertising services (not that those three are exactly the same content problem).
And those political ploys tend to scream "censorship" (or reference "concerning developments") when they don't like the moderation, and scream for regulation when they deem the moderation too absent.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/17/zuckerb...
The hard part is who is deciding what is true and what is not. It’s important to verify authenticity of the message (who the message claims to come from is actually who it’s coming from), but deciding what to disallow based on truthiness is a lot more problematic.
From a slightly different direction.. for instance: banning any content that contravenes the WHO's official recommendations for pandemic response definitely feels too narrow, esp given that the WHO might reverse course or admit they weren't optimal. I completely disagree with Trump's defunding of support for the WHO, I don't agree with everything the WHO says, but I also can't see how conferring 100% content authority to that body is aligned with democratic free speech. That position is also consistent with the idea of banning any content that isn't aligned with, say, this American administration's positions.
"We don’t fact-check political ads. We don’t do this to help politicians, but because we think people should be able to see for themselves what politicians are saying. And if content is newsworthy, we also won’t take it down even if it would otherwise conflict with many of our standards. I know many people disagree, but in general, I don't think it's right for a private company to censor politicians or the news in a democracy."
Ben Thompson of Stratechery quoted the same bit I just did, and wrote, "I couldn't agree more. The only hangup is the person who was saying it. [...] The very structure of [Facebook] is antithetical to what is necessary for free expression to flourish; I believe that Zuckerberg is well-intentioned, but that doesn’t change the fact he is completely unaccountable."
This is such a cop out. Many (I'd even venture on most) political ads on Facebook don't represent what politicians say.
1 ads are microtargeted so most people don't see what people are saying.
2 censoring everyone except politicians is bootlicking government.
The full text is worth reading.
Check out Hatching Twitter. It presents the entire foundation, with Dorsey and Ev Williams as well meaning but flawed leaders that were more than happy to stab each other in the back when it helped them. That Medium turned out as it did, and that Twitter has changed little in the last 15 years isn't surprising. They were accidents of history and they're now stuck trying to please their existing power users and Wall Street, regardless of if that's what we really need as societies.
It goes without saying, but our families and friends are literally dying because these platforms are so bad at handling disinformation. The question is if they are even capable and if not, why?
We're either going to see the net balkanize (as it has in some places) or lose the freedom and hope that it used to entail or both. It is an existential threat, which is why these guys should be criticized all day until they show some real responsibility.
Here's an article that was on HN by the same author that sounds similarly skeptical about Dorsey:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/04/in-the-coronavirus-e...
Several former board members and high-level executives at Twitter (who have since become apostates of Dorsey), for example, have pointed out to me how even his morning ritual is full of holes and is not too dissimilar to Holmes’s and Neumann’s rituals. As for the 45 total minutes Dorsey allegedly spends in his 220-degree sauna at night (which he breaks up into three separate stints), two World Sauna Championship competitors (yes, that’s a thing) collapsed after spending six minutes in a sauna only 10 degrees warmer than Dorsey’s (which is already hotter than boiling water). After being dragged out, the competitors were treated for severe burns, and one of the men died. Then there is Dorsey’s assertion that he is running both publicly traded companies while he works from home two days a week.
What interesting controversial content are they banning specifically? Ethnonationalist propaganda?
I'm really annoyed by the common effect where people complaining about censorship on the big platforms always complain about it in vague abstract terms, because that gets a lot more support than complaining about people getting banned for targeted harassment or encouraging forcible removal of non-whites... Shout-out to a pithy evergreen tweet on this: https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/105039166355267174....
Ten people want to say thing 1 on twitter. Ten people want to say thing 2 on Twitter. Ten want to say thing 3, and so on for ten million things. Twenty people don't want to say anything particularly controversial and don't think anyone else should either. If the groups of ten don't address free speech as an abstract ideal, each of the hundred million will be individually silenced by the twenty.
Arguably calls to violence and ethnonationalist propaganda are things that should be similarly prohibited. I find it interesting that whenever there's a thread about an instance of that stuff being banned, people complaining about the ban rarely defend it specifically. They always go to arguing about some ideal of absolute free speech, but completely avoid the topic of what else that would allow. This setup makes me pretty suspicious of other cases that people avoid specifics and argue for absolute free speech on popular platforms. Whenever a platform bans something that's more defensible, people will always readily talk about and defend the specific thing that got banned rather than falling back to absolute generalizations about free speech.
It's easy to prove that taboo topics need to be allowed: it's taboo today to express the usual 2004 opinion on homosexuality, and it was taboo in 2004 to express today's usual opinion on the same topic. So no matter what your beliefs are you have to admit that you, personally, either need or needed cover for having taboo opinions.
No, of course I can't defend any individual taboo, I'm part of the group of normals that enforce them in polite society. However I have no choice to concede that out of the long list of 2020 taboos, one might be wrong.
Facebook/Twitter/popular social media as we know it barely existed in 2004, but I'm going to make a guess that discussing homosexuality wasn't banned on any of them (or whichever precursors of similar style and policies existed) around that timeframe. I feel like by picking that time frame, you're alluding to the speech standards that newspapers or TV imposed on themselves, and I'm very glad that social media doesn't impose that kind of standard on all of its users, but I don't think anything present suggests that social media is in danger of slipping to that standard. It looks like those dynamics are a world apart, and drawing these parallels is very misleading.
A bit of an aside, considering a taboo opinion which often prompts discussions about censorship online (an opinion that I think is bad and is taboo for good reasons, including that it's hard to detach from harmful calls to action, but I imagine it could be): talking about the possibility of differences in human capability in sex or race is taboo, but it's generally not outright censored in social media as long as it's not tied with calls to action like "#race war now". I feel like there's an overlap between those of the opinion social media is censoring too much and people outraged at James Damore being fired from Google, but I feel like people conflate him being fired from a tech company with the content moderation policies of social media. He was never banned from YouTube/Facebook/Twitter/Google services, but I get the impression that the volume of defense of him is linked to people thinking that did or will happen. It seems right to me that a large serve-everyone social media company would have different standards of its employees and the content hosted. (Silly example: I wouldn't expect a large social media site to ban a user for routinely posting that "$site is the worst", but I wouldn't find it surprising if an employee at that site was fired for that.) One could argue that Google went too far in firing him (and I'm glad those arguments are permitted in many places even though I disagree with them), but I often see it all bundled with the argument that this is a sign that social media itself is too censored and should be censored less, despite that it already permits him and that the enforcement line is still a world apart from him.
I guess my fundamental disagreement is that the two (censorship of taboos one deems undiscussable and censorship of taboos one deems discussable) don't seem so separate at all. Many of the same people want them, and for many of the same reasons. 1990s network TV was trying to appease the exact same public that Facebook would have tried to appease in 1990 if they existed back then and also had an attitude of appeasement. You, personally, have moderate views and sound relatively liberal in what you're willing to allow other people to discuss, but I'm not facing the decision of whether or not to appoint you as the censor: the issue at hand is whether or not we trust public outrage and the overall zeitgeist to determine what companies are afraid of being associated with, thereby determining what they censor. You can't set up a system with the idea that corporations will be reasonable or have a conscience.
They ban interesting content all the time - a very recent example is they banned the AYTU Bioscience page where they talk about an experimental covid treatment.
YouTube censored their videos as well.
Also the Aytu ban was pushed by a NYTimes writer and twitter often bends their rules to that. Aytu bioscience is a publicly traded company with deals with one of the largest hospitals on tech they have been working on since 2016. They even have a SEC filing from this week of their deal on the tech which twitter and YouTube both banned because a nytimes reporter complained (bias against the president).
Ironically, I think the reason is recognizable from epidemiology. The network of twitter followers is just denser than the network of bloggers ever was or likely ever will be. Even the very best blog posts still tended not to spread even an order of magnitude as well as a good tweet thread. As much as I hate the format, I don't think blogs can or will displace it.
The network allows things to go viral, but I don't think a retweet or tweets are very consumable. Twitter has an atrocious UI. I think when people do these threads tweet storm things, it's way way less readable than essays people were writing a thousand of years ago. I close the page when I encounter those and shake my head at how redundant all the extra stuff is between each sentence. Who naturally writes like that? It's almost like we are going backwards.
The only reason Twitter is big and the network has the power it does it because by a chance of history it got celebs on it in the middle of the last decade. I think content creators, especially devs, should be aware that there are a lot of us (dozens of us!) that won't touch Twitter with a ten foot pole. I don't go out of my way to read Tweets and I never ever check out someone's Twitter feed because I can't stand the site and the narcissism it fuels.
It's like America Online keywords. Someday it will be a dead piece of history. Twitter, what's that, grandpa?
We're funneling our content through platforms that amplify those who talk the most and/or have the patience to comb through that. How many voices are excluded because people don't want that?
Couldn't agree more. Some good info gets distributed that way, but so does even more crap. It does tax people's ability to filter.
> Twitter has an atrocious UI.
Sure, twitter.com has a terrible UI, but there are many other UIs available that are better
> there are a lot of us (dozens of us!) that won't touch Twitter with a ten foot pole.
There are a lot of us who do use Twitter too. I'm connected to probably over a hundred fellow developers, sysadmins, computer scientists, etc. One step away through them are thousands, and we do learn from each other every day. (More so than here, that's for damn sure.) Avoiding Twitter means missing out on that, just like using only Twitter would mean missing out on blog content. It's a high price to pay for fashion, and people who avoid or dump on Twitter for that reason seem to outnumber those who do so out of genuine principle by a large margin.
Go to Wordpress and get your dog-gone blog on.
OK, they're still out there, but they rely on Twitter and sites like Hacker News to drive traffic. The RSS-driven native blog ecosystem is nothing like what it was in the Reader days.
One might find a clear point of inflection on blog traffic with the demise of Google Reader, but basically people just quit writing blog posts when the new wore off.
Children (parenthood) wiped out a lot of my discretionary time, for example.
On Twitter, there is discoverability. As you browse, you frequently jump across profiles, and are continuously recommended users to follow.
On Twitter, there is brevity. In general, blogs are not designed for hundreds of short posts.
On Twitter, you do not have to pay for hosting, nor do you have to manage anything.
So there are a mix of technical, social, and network effects. Until these problems are overcome with a single solution, Twitter will retain its stranglehold on content.
---
Personally, I wish Twitter would just remove post length restrictions and make it a proper micro-to-macro blogging service. (To be clear: I'm not a fan of a Twitter monoculture, I hate their UI, they make getting data difficult, their site is painfully slow, and they are often user-hostile. But it's been years and no micro-to-macro blogging service has overtaken them, and at this point it'd be better to have something dastardly that works, than something dastardly that doesn't.)
I would rather not wade through 10000 word thesises and then sentence by sentence "takedowns" in the response
I still like Twitter for getting a broad range of thoughts quickly. I view it as a very rough pulse of public consciousness. Not a research paper or word from God.
A series of tweets won’t have this problem, people aren’t trying to game SEO. They’re gaming social media which has a different set of incentives for good/bad
Everyone loved Medium, too, in their Year 3 when they were just burning VC cash and nobody there cared about being a profitable, sustainable business.
I'm a little skeptical about the overall size of their market or their ability to create sustainable revenue opportunities for individual creators in the long term, but they certainly have more obvious a pathway to revenue than Medium.
They ought to be investing in low friction, easy to use customer acquisition tooling for creators btw. Something that doesn't feel like marketing but is, effectively, marketing. That's where they can apply those millions in technology and differentiate between Medium. For these "substacks" (btw this phrase is actively being xeroxed and they should invest in ensuring this is the case) where people are trying to quit their jobs to become full-time creators, they need to come with a story and tooling that eases these creators into the idea that part of their new lifestyle is keeping certain KPIs up and to the right (without drenching these concepts in growth jargon).
By doing this they can effectively outsource their growth to their customers: they take the vig from creators and at the same time utilize the creators to grow their platform. It's a smart idea.
Not a bad business but they've taken $160 million in finding to get there.
Actually, my bigger point was just that the tech industry is full of businesses that were hot & sexy in their early years and then people got disappointed when they tried to start being a real business in year 7 or 8 or 9.
Instead of jumping from the Medium hype train to the Substack hype train....it is probably safer just to get off all the hype trains and assume any given startup will eventually try to become profitable and screw over old time customers in the process. You're going to be about 90% right with that as your default assumption.
1. The user can not directly comment with an RSS nor contact the author in some way
2. Author can not gain profit from RSS. Nor the reader app, distributor and publishers. There needs to be a payment option in RSS style.
Twitter and Facebook are exactly opposite of this, it's built upon layers of layers of connections and there is no way to enumerate the whole graph. It gets tired pretty fast and became an echo chamber. Contents tend to get shorter to grab attention with fragmented information everywhere.
And in the era of mobile phones, making content on a small screen is painful. But making viral videos are not. I think someday if videos are just easily indexable and searchable as texts, Tiktok can become the blogging platform of next generation.
It seems the world need a massively scalable messaging backbone, and when twitter was created I thought (IIRC, this is a decade ago and I can't remember if and where I wrote it down) something like that would happen:
Basic Twitter would stay free and there would be all kinds of paid services on top:
- it could be extended to allow APIs for machine to machine communication.
- it could be improved to be used for groups and one to one messaging (WhatsApp, later Telegram took this market. Google+ had a decent chance to get a slice of another part of it.)
- they could charge for API access or for more than what clearly personal usage (more than a few groups, multilanguage distribution, near realtime machine to machine communication etc)
When I think about it now here's another one:
- paid subscriptions to feeds. Examples: news feeds (maybe you pay for access to your newspapers)
Instead they become what I would describe as a spam distribution machine where you can follow celebrities.
Frankly, that seems like a long way to go for what is effectively twitlonger. If you buy the premise that Twitter is effective at amplifying the right voices (very much still up for debate), and the problem is the interface for long-form content, then it seems to need a much simpler UX fix rather than trying to invent a separate-but-joined platform from whole cloth.
So, wishing for them to work won't help.
https://theconversation.com/ was an attempt at blogs 2.0 and it's failed. (failed as in an educated longform alternative to Twitter, it might make money however)
Medium is doing ok.
I think maybe gatekept shortform media might be possible, it's in part what HN is. I would look at furthering HN to the next level.
long-form would be interesting if it were a pull-based model (N followers of some expert want their opinion on some piece of information)
public follower networks are also valuable -- the signal value of one expert following another is non-zero
Their platform is excellent, their content not so much.
>The most important skill that you should develop to improve your life
This is dev.to in a nutshell.
Not sure how it compares to hackernoon, but it seems they are competing well towards the nadir of technical decision making and advice.
By Genericus Portlandnius, 20, ex-barista and anthropology major, I love cats, Javascript, and React. Looking to get hired.
- Posting on Twitter just begs the "get an audience" question. You can't just GET followers, it takes months or years of constant content creation, tagging, hashtagging, etc to get an audience.
- Subreddits are very hit-or-miss, and a lot of them will flat-out ban you for posting your own blog content, even if it's non-monetized OC (been there)
- Hacker News is a single-stream audience, and while occasionally you'll get onto the front page, more often content dies with a few dozen views. And it's not an especially differentiated audience.
For someone whose job is content creation, this might be realistic, but you're asking experts in a field -- whose primary job is research, and being an expert, not social media outreach -- to spend a huge portion of their time on audience generation and self-promotion. That's not realistic.
I hate Medium, for a ton of reasons, but it succeeds at making it easy for one-off or two-off writers to get a large audience without investing years of work on it. Sure, the audience isn't WORTH a lot to them (they can't monetize it, and it could get pulled from under them at the drop of a hat), but if the goal is to spread a message or get a post read, sorry, it's still a very viable outlet for doing that.
This is a genuine question - i only know Medium from the reader's side, where it is something that makes me about 20% less likely to read your writing!
Also try to engage one or two people who for no apparent reason seem to enjoy your content and start writing for them.
If you want your posts to be seen, the main thing to do is to try to get them linked in as many places as possible. If you use Twitter, tweet the links. If you use Reddit, post the links in an appropriate Subreddit. (Those can drive a surprising amount of traffic.) If you're in niche communities that have their own forums, Slack channels, Discord servers, Telegram channels, etc., etc., and your article is on-topic, link it there. You need to do this all in a way that isn't spammy or obnoxious, for obvious reasons: you're saying "I think this link will be interesting to the audience here," but if you're really saying "OMG I need the hits click on me click on me click on me," people will pick up on it.
And then... hope. The chances are the post still isn't going to go anywhere in particular, but getting the link seen and shared by others is what will eventually drive an audience to it.
The more articles you write, the more likely you are to get something once in a while which catches on. Writing at least semi-regularly also helps. And, not to put too fine a point on it, but you have to actually have something interesting to say. "Join a New Developer on Their Journey With The Same Technologies The Last 58,213 Developers Who Wrote 'My Developer Journey' Blogs" will probably not cut it.
None of these things are specific to Medium, obviously, and frankly I don't think posting on Medium is a really great choice. If you're looking for a free blog, start it at WordPress.com, and maybe pony up the $15 a year to connect it to a custom domain. (I blogged at Tumblr for years, which can actually be set up to be a terrific blogging platform if you choose the right theme, but I'm not sure about its long-term viability at this point.)
There's just so little there of value amonst an absolutely swarm of careerists (see every journo) sociopaths (see anyone replying to a journo) and arseholes (see anyone replying to anyone they don't follow). This isn't a COVID-19 thing, this is essential to twitter as a platform. And the SV folks know it too- which is why their libertarian credentials went out the window the second it got serious.
There's absolutely a problem that there are experts on twitter, because it's preventing them from being somewhere they can be seen by anyone with an ounce of sense, but the replacement to twitter needs more connectivity than blogs (not as much as twitter) and the classical separation of author from consumer. That's the fundamental problem - you could be Fauci or Trump, you're still just a twit. Whereas in the past it would be Fauci writing an update on the HHS website, and Trump being ignored on Sean Hannity's comment section.
Look, I don't like those popups too. And I, too, prefer media that doesn't do that. But at the same time, keeping in mind how hard it is to make any kind of money in that market, I don't have the guts to tell those people how to run their business.